To elude boredom man either works harder than is required to satisfy his other needs or he invents play, that is to say work designed to assuage no other need than the need for work as such.

What is this? It is our habituation to work as such, which now asserts itself as a new, additional need and the more strongly habituated we are to working, perhaps even the more we have suffered need, the stronger this new need will be. In the intervals, however, during which our needs have been assuaged and are as it were sleeping, we are overtaken by boredom. Need compels us to perform work with the proceeds of which the need is assuaged need continually recurs and we are thus accustomed to working. Human, All Too Human well deserves its subtitle 'A Book for Free Spirits', and its original dedication to Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here found a new champion. Many themes of his later work make their initial appearance here, expressed with unforgettable liveliness and subtlety. In this wide-ranging work Nietzsche first employed his celebrated aphoristic style, so perfectly suited to his iconoclastic, penetrating and multi-faceted thought. Hollingdale's distinguished translation (originally published in the series Cambridge Texts in German Philosophy) with a new introduction by Richard Schacht. In 1886 Nietzsche republished them together in a two-volume edition, with new prefaces to each volume. The first (now Volume I) appeared in 1878, just before Nietzsche abandoned academic life, with a first supplement entitled The Assorted Opinions and Maxims following in 1879, and a second entitled The Wanderer and his Shadow a year later.

Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spiritsīy Nietzsche, Friedrich (1996) Abstract This remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms was originally published in three instalments.

Nietzsche all too human